Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise in the House this evening to speak on behalf of the residents in my riding of Davenport in Toronto to issues that are of deep concern to them and issues that they want me to raise in this place.
Tonight I will talk a bit about urban issues, the issues that are deeply affecting big cities like Toronto. Toronto has, if we include the GTA, the greater Toronto area, about 5.5 million people, which represents roughly around 20% of Canada's GDP. We have a multiplicity of human resources to draw from. About 50% of Canada's new immigrants settle in the greater Toronto area and yet we are faced with some particular issues on which we have tried to get some engagement with the government side.
The government does like to invoke jurisdictional boundaries as its reason for inaction on certain urban files. We think that is unfortunate because if there were leadership and a will on the part of the government to really focus on a city's agenda, then we could make some movement on some of these issues.
For example, notwithstanding all the numbers that the government likes to throw about at will, the issue of affordable housing in the city of Toronto has not been solved. In fact, it is an issue that is affecting not only low-income people, but it is also affecting middle-income Canadians as well. It is almost impossible for people to buy a house in the city of Toronto unless they have significant means and it is getting harder for families to find rental accommodations.
The government loves to say that it will let the free market handle these things, that the market will solve the issue of affordable housing in Toronto. I do not know how many years or how many decades it needs to finally realize that the market will not solve the affordable housing crisis that affects cities like Toronto and actually affects cities, small towns and rural municipalities across the country.
The government needs to take a much broader look at urban issues, issues of transit, issues of housing and issues of support for new Canadians. It has cut funding to immigrant settlement services in Toronto and yet 50% of the immigrants come to Toronto. That makes no sense to me and it makes no sense to most people who think about these things in a rational way.
I invite the government to take a more balanced approach to big cities.
I know the member opposite will stand and talk about all the wonderful things the government is doing but she needs to give Canadians a sense of how the government is solving the problem of affordable housing, of congestion, of historic traffic jams. We have one of the worst cases of gridlock occur daily in the GTA. We lose $5 billion in lost productivity due to gridlock.
I would love to hear the government finally, in a real way, enter a dialogue and talk about these issues.